In conventional voice synthesizing apparatuses, a synthesized voice is produced on the basis of a text or phonetic symbols obtained by analyzing the text.
In recent years, a pet robot has been proposed which has a voice synthesizer and is capable of speaking to or talking with a user.
In such a pet robot, a voice is synthesized by a voice synthesizer disposed therein in accordance with a text or phonetic symbols corresponding to an utterance to be made, and the resultant synthesized voice is output.
In the pet robot, once the outputting of the synthesized voice is started, the outputting of the synthesized voice is continued until the complete synthesized voice has been output. However, when a user scolds the pet robot when the synthesized voice is being output, if the pet robot continues outputting the synthesized voice, that is, if the pet robot continues uttering, the robot gives a strange impression to the user.